AMP 9.6 & AST 5.0: What's New

Release Details

Date and Time: Friday, January 26, 2018 at 9pm EST/6pm PST

Released Products: Access Assistant (AST) 5.0, AMP 9.6, Alchemy 2.0

Expected Outage: Up to 6 hours

Release Highlights

Alchemy 2.0

Alchemy 2.0 is a complete redesign and re-architecting of the Alchemy product, taking into account 2 years of customer feedback to improve the performance, functionality and user experience. A primary goal of this new release was to replace the testing engine in Alchemy with Access Engine. With this release, all Level Access products use Access Engine for accessibility testing. Additionally, the user interface for defining Alchemy fixes has been moved to Access Assistant, so all of your testing and remediation can be done in one place. Note: The old “Alchemy toolbar” is now scheduled for deprecation in Q2 2018, with a specific, definitive deprecation date to be announced in March.

General User Experience Improvements

Alchemy 2.0 was a big undertaking, but we managed to make some smaller improvements while we rebuilt an entire product from the ground up:

Accessibility Improvements: A number of accessibility improvements were made to AMP to improve the user experience for our assistive technology users.

Analytics Performance Improvements: We’ve been making improvements to Access Analytics under the covers with a lot more planned for the next several months. You should notice a speedier Analytics with this release, and each release in the first half of 2018.

Bug Fixes: A number of small defects on dashboards and reports were fixed.

Other Important Updates

We Value Your Feedback

Help us improve your experience by taking our short survey. It takes just a minute to make an impact on your product experience. Select the following link to share your thoughts: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/TL87LP7

Access Help Desk is now Access Advisor

On February 2nd, 2018, Access Help Desk will officially be renamed as Access Advisor. There are no changes to the service offering (yet), but the new name more accurately reflects what Access Advisor has to offer to our customers. Interested in learning more? Email us at info@levelaccess.com(?) so we can tell you how Access Advisor can help you improve your accessibility compliance, while allowing your development team focus on what they do best.

Want to learn more about this release?

Download the Detailed Release Notes attached to this article for a select, but more detailed list of defects and improvements made in this release.